Preliminary study of the field of baboon research and outline of a collaboration between primatologists and sociologists of science; this article was prepared before observing the first meeting on baboon research organized by Shirley Strum

A comparative ethnography of fact-making in science and judgment-making in law may allow to separate again what has been mixed up in the traditional definition of matter of fact: an ability to close up the discussion and an ability to produce proofs by enticing objects to bear witness on what is said about them. There is objectivity in both but one refers to a mental attitude of indifference to the solution while the other -objectity- refers to the many intimate and even passionnate contacts with the state of affairs at hand. It would surely be advantageous to distinguish again refererential chains of science and the very peculiar type of closure of law.

It just so happened that in August 2005, at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, I had been asked to think up a closing event for “Making Things Public”, an international exhibition I had curated on the necessity to renew politics by allowing it to be, as we said, object-oriented.1 That period corresponded, alas, with the French rejection of the European Constitution in May 2005. Already at the time I had been struck by the strange inability of my friends and colleagues to speak strongly not only on behalf of the European Union as a complex institutional machine, but also of Europe as ground, land, earth, a soil, a history, a material thing, an issue; in brief, a reality as obvious as what attached each of them to their own country. Why were they so timid?

Since the time of Politics of Nature (Latour 2004) I have always admired environmentalists forin the ways in which they have multiplied the issues to be tackled, and but I have also criticized the general representation they provide of their many useful fights. Yet Theis is why the difference between the environmental movement and difference with the history of the social movements is so striking. Since From the mid- 19th century until to the mid- 20th century, socialists as well as communists have tried to rethink the entirety of Western philosophy to frame the fights against inequalities and injustice. It is true that they had Hegel to help them frame the whole circus! The work carried out ofby political ecology was never developed to that extent. They have absorbed swallowed hook, line, and sinker the perverse notion of a nature --, and especially its exteriority to politics --,, the notion of the global, and the whole ideal of objective science, in a way that has ensured thatsuch a way that in the end the connection between social movements and ecological movements have remained separated. Nature has indeed remained distinct and exterior to politics proper, . Justjust as it was entrenched in Western philosophy in the 17th and 18th century. I agree that it was easier to to frame the social movements rather than the ecological onemovement, especially for people in the West, but still, the work of rethinking nature and science should have been carried out.